Check out the new toy! Don’t be tooooo jealous, it’s just on loan. (from MakerBot, sweet.)

Making a pen holder for my desk tomorrow, we’re going to try it with the clear PLA, wish me luck!

Meanwhile, check out Thingiverse and all the things you could make. 

I’ve spent the majority of my week combing through an internet’s worth of peer-reviewed journal articles looking for information about splitable bicomponent spunbond nonwovens for commercially viable nanofiber production. (a potential post, if anyone is interested in that long string of jargon) While immersed in the wonderful world of academia I happened upon something actually really cool…. Taggants! 

Quick Review:

Spunbond is a thermoplastic polymer direct web formation process. Aka: It takes melted plastic and makes it directly into sheets of fibers for nonwoven textile production. Cool. Part of the spundbond machine is the spinpack, which determines the shape and size of the fibers, and they come in a huge variety. But none as undeniably awesome as taggants.

Please keep scale in mind while viewing this image. That logo is a cross-section of a fiber about the width of a thread. Amazing!

Taggants are actually useful, aside from displaying how incredible Hills Inc.’s spinpacks are. They can be used to protect patents and intellectual property, the possibilities for security and counterfeit prevention are enormous.

“The logo can even be a two-dimensional barcode that can be read by a machine vision system, thereby stealthily incorporating large amounts of information into a product. The tagged product need not be a fibrous product, but can include electronics, pharmaceuticals, gemstones, explosives, or virtually anything used in an application in which forensic identification could be of value.” (Jeffery S. Dugan for Textile World)

My personal favorite: